Dreams, Metaphors, Latin?!? This is not your typical Michael Bay flick...yet somehow, it is?

Rating: 7/10 (9 July 2005)

The first thing to great your eyes in the Island, the new film from action director Michael Bay (Bad Boys, the Rock) is not something you would have expected. It is not a car chase, it is not a fight sequence, it is not the introduction of the Latin American drug dealer villain showing us how villainy he is by killing somebody in cold blood and stuffing his body in a straw basket. No...it is, how do I put this? It is a dream. A lovely, nightmarish dream. A dream in which two people float towards an island paradise, apparently in love, obviously escaping some sort of a horrible tragedy. The dream ends when some pale, veiny humanoid creatures pull our main character into the water. Cut to: a white, desolate apartment building. Our hero, Licoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor), awakes from his dream, goes to the bathroom, looks at himself in the mirror, and gets dressed. It is an opening sequence worthy of an art-house Utopian Society gone wrong picture rarely seen in todays blockbusters. And especially rarely seen from someone like Michael Bay, a person who, like many of you, I'm sure, don't particularly like. (I even bought the Team America Soundtrack just for that one song: Pearl Harbor Sucks) Yet even as amazing as this opening sequence appears to be, it will all but be erased from your memory as we see Lincoln get dressed. Because the first thing you see as he opens is drawer filled a few pairs of shoes and white, uniform jumpsuits, is the Puma and Nike symbols shamelessly slathered across each piece of fabric and shoe heel like maple syrup on pancakes. Every five minutes we are greeted by a new product trademark (Aquafina, Chevrolet, even XBOX for Christ's sake) and we are quickly reminded that even though this film may seem like something we've never seen before, in essence, it is. The first thirty minutes or so of the movie contains no action sequences, but character development and actual explanation of the society these people live in. I don't want to ruin it for you, so I'll just say that the first thirty minutes of the movie are good, the next hour and a half there are action sequences galore, so no need to fear. Despite all of new things Mr. Bay has shown us in this film (The Island is the metaphor by the way...it shouldn't be that hard to figure out) we eventually realize that this is a Michael Bay movie. Slow motion falling shots, bullets being seen flying through the air, sweeping shots of cities, the camera swirling around a main character, to name a few. So even though you'll be disappointed at the few flaws the film has (the product placement was my main complaint) there is some new stuff there too. You'll just have to sift through the bad to find the good (hell, there's even a recurring theme in the form of a Latin word, tell me you've seen that before in a Michael Bay flick) It's kind of like combing the beach of a tropical island. If you just keep searching, you'll find what you like. Who knows...you might even love it.
7/10